Tawes Crab Feast

Again, outside of the Florida political realm, but the stuff of lore--the Tawes Crab Feast on Maryland's Eastern Shore is this Wednesday and I'm sure it will be a repeat of previous festivities. Hot, very hot and hazy. Without a big-ticket political race in Maryland, the First District congressional race will command center stage. And Obama vs McCain will be huge.

Expect to see at least a hundred political signs spread throughout the field, if you can make them out in the Old Bay spiced afternoon haze.

I don't know that Florida has a similar political rite in its history, one that pulls from nearly every region of the state and is a must for every statewide politico.

The Butterfly Effect

More beachside fun.

Between Storms

In the summertime in rural Virginia, you pack in as much activity before the afternoon thunderheads come crashing down. When the August doldrums send everyone out of the Washington political centers, the Lower Potomac is still in season for fishing, rowing, sailing, and kayaking.



Get lost in the marsh and forget Washington for a while.




An ecosystem in action; blackish brown marsh water flowing into the lighter Potomac river surf.

Virginia and Florida

Comparing the states has more importance than you'd think in figuring out how a Sunshine State U.S. senator divides work and play--especially a hunter and fisherman.

In our nation's capital, at work, you've got easy access to bird fields in Shenandoah, Croaker and Spot in the Potomac, and some of the best sweet corn in the world.

I've shown lots of woodsy pictures of north Florida on this blog; I think it's time for more hot shots of rural Virginia.

Personally, I'm partial to the Old Dominion. A bad day in the Northern Neck beats a good one in Washington, DC.


I love how this tree branch looks like a crooked demon hand from Halloween.



In the city, especially in a pressure cooker like Washington, you measure time by how long it takes to get to places by taxi or metro, whether a light is red or green, when a particular vote will be taken on the floor of the Senate, and every day is sliced into at least ten pieces by a scheduler. In the countryside, time is more of an amorphous sea like this wheat field. You wait around long enough and the green shade will turn to a parched brown. There is the green season, the brown, and the harvest. Life on the farm.

"With The People" Days

Some nice down-home, home-grown rural politickin' in the Old Dominion State. Former Governor Mark Warner works the crowd and signs autographs. Once you're governor, the title never leaves you.

Warner left office in 2005 with something like a 70% approval rating. I don't think it's decline since. Nobody would every call him a backslapper or a good ole boy, but he can communicate in Richmond as well Appomattox , as you can see here. Warner can talk cell phones and software manufacturing the way Lawton Chiles talked turkeys and raccoons.

It's doubtful Mark Warner could ever play a tune on a fiddle, but folks in Southwest Virginia seem to love to watch him try.

This clip is just a wonderful look at vote-getting handshake to handshake.

A Leafy Personality

Seems to me there are lots of books--children's books especially come to mind--about trees with larger-than-life personalities. Trees that become shelters of some kind to kids' imaginations. They become treehouses or forts or just a great place to curl up and read a book with one's back supported. Physically and spiritually the trees are there for support. There is a tree at my family's farm with a short limb about neck-height that is perfect for impromptu chin-ups. I can't imagine it as anything but a chin-up bar. That sort of detail is great for writing. If at first it doesn't seem relevant, just make a note of it and come back to it. It might just hit the spot.

Especially in literature of the South, trees evoke a sense of place and time--whether magnolias or weeping willows or live oaks.

When I think of the Civil War, one of the main images replaying in my head is Union marching along dirt paths as live oaks and Spanish moss blowing in the wind, like in the film Glory. Then of course there is the film Steel Magnolias. Anything about Florida usually features the palm tree in some fashion.

Something to think about when writing: where to put trees, what kind of trees to use, how they build a scene and evoke a certain string of memories.

Southern Places

In a recent interviewer, the subject said that southerners have a stronger sense of place than most. I wonder if that's true. He happened to hail from Claremont in Lake County, Florida.

Another random thought: isn't the city in literature normally a corrupting, evil institution? From the mythical Babylon to Manhattan Transfer to even the Superman comic strip, the city represents not just knowledge but also a degradation of values.

I was thinking about how the Walk across Florida, seen through a literary criticism lens, is basically a romance. A man finds himself and his state in the backwoods, not in downtown Orlando.

I'm patching together a rural photo album of Virginia that I'll post soon with some brief comments.